BURGER KING | WHOPPER SACRIFICE | 2009
Ten Friends, Burned for a Burger / BURGER KING "WHOPPER SACRIFICE"
Delete ten friends on Facebook and you get a free Whopper. The person you deleted gets a notification saying 'You have chosen a Whopper over your friend.' It was a bomb CP+B dropped in 2009.
The problem
This was the third campaign in a string that Burger King and CP+B launched to celebrate the Whopper's 50th anniversary. It started with 25,000 leftover free coupons, combined with a nagging observation: people have hundreds of Facebook friends, yet almost never delete anyone.
The insight
What's interesting is that the campaign never talks about the Whopper's taste or quality at all. It just asks one question: which do you like more, your friends or a Whopper? The whole idea grew out of spotting a gap in Facebook itself—there was no real way to break up with a friend.
The idea
Using the app, you picked ten friends to 'sacrifice' and got a free coupon in return. Deleting someone triggered an animation of their photo burning, and the deleted friend received a notification reading, 'Your friendship was worth one-tenth of a Whopper.' To get revenge, that person would install the app too—so every single deletion brought in a new user.
What happened
In ten days, 82,000 people installed the app, and 233,906 people were 'sacrificed.' Facebook eventually shut the app down for violating privacy rules, but CP+B turned even that into news, declaring that 'Whopper Sacrifice had itself become a sacrifice.' The campaign won awards including at Cannes, and 'unfriend' was named Oxford Dictionary's Word of the Year that year.
Afterthought
Saying a friend is worth one Whopper is both incredibly rude and incredibly honest. The idea was reportedly killed eight times internally before it finally got approved—with lawyers on standby, no less. That takes real guts. So... deleting anyone today?
Awards
- Cannes Lions Grand Prix 2009
